Chamber of Deputies

The Plenary is the centre of the Chamber's activity, where major decisions are made and the topics on the agenda are debated. The activities of the Chamber include: votes on motions of confidence and no-confidence in the Government; debates and votes on most bills; policy-setting (voting on motions and resolutions) and scrutiny activities (with questions and interpellations) addressed to the Government, which may also report to the Plenary and provide urgent statements and information.

The Chamber organises its business by planning the legislative agenda: to this end, the Conference of Group Chairpersons (or the President of the Chamber, if the majority provided for in the Rules of Procedure is not obtained) establishes the programme and the order of business, i.e. the main documents defining the activities of the Plenary. Indeed, they are also a fundamental point of reference for the organisation of Committees, which are required to consider the bills included in the Plenary's programme and order of business as a matter of priority. The order of business also provides for the organisation of the overall time available for consideration of each of the topics scheduled for debate in the Plenary ("allotment of time").

The order of business indicates the days set aside for debate and those on which the Plenary will hold votes: in conjunction with the latter, the Committees may not sit.

As to the procedures followed by the Plenary to adopt its own deliberations, the Rules of Procedure provide for voting by show of hands, although this has in fact been replaced by electronic voting, which allows each Deputy to vote from his/her seat by activating his/her voting station through a personal identification system and using a personal voting card. Each Deputy has three buttons at his/her voting station: green for a yes vote, red for a no vote and white for abstention.

In particular, a distinction is made between:

• qualified voting with an electronic procedure, which involves recording of voters and of votes cast (roll-call vote) or else only recording of the names of voters (secret ballot). Qualified voting is carried out in the cases provided for by the Rules of Procedure (final votes on laws are always carried out by roll-call, except in cases where secret ballot is permitted), as well as upon request of the prescribed number of Deputies (in fact, requests for roll-call votes are made at the beginning of each Parliament and referred to all sittings). Qualified voting enables the President, before the result is announced (number of Deputies present, number of Deputies voting, abstentions, yes votes and no votes), to immediately establish the presence of a quorum, i.e. the presence of the minimum number of Deputies provided for by the Constitution (half plus one of the members of the Chamber) for deliberations of the Chamber to be valid (to this effect, Deputies on mission are always considered present). For each qualified voting, the list of Deputies who have voted shall be published in the verbatim report of the sitting, together with the vote cast by each, in the case of roll-call votes;
• non-qualified voting with an electronic procedure, i.e. which does not involve recording of voters or a quorum call. It is provided for by the Rules of Procedure for procedural votes, which in the past used to be carried out by show of hands and for which the electronic procedure has now been introduced, although without recording of names, in order to facilitate the counting of votes. In this case, only the result of voting is reported (approval or rejection), without indication of the number of yes votes and no votes (only the difference between them).

As to votes on confidence, i.e. those in which votes are cast on a motion of confidence in the Government or no confidence in the Government or in individual Ministers, the roll-call vote on the question of confidence raised by the Government may not be carried out by means of an electronic procedure but rather, as provided for by the Constitution, by actually calling the roll.